


Home is the Hunter, Home from the Sea and the Airman Home from the Sky

by Bookwormsarah



Category: Anne of Green Gables - L. M. Montgomery
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-18
Updated: 2015-12-18
Packaged: 2018-05-07 12:24:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5456453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bookwormsarah/pseuds/Bookwormsarah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shirley, after the War.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Home is the Hunter, Home from the Sea and the Airman Home from the Sky

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CheshirePrime](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CheshirePrime/gifts).



> The title is shamelessly adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson's Requiem  
> (http://www.bartleby.com/103/15)

And then it was over. 

The news came through to Shirley as he was refitting the camera to the side of his 'plane in preparation for the afternoon. They had been fogbound since dawn – a creeping, clammy fog which made him long for the witchy charms of Rainbow Valley. While most of Glen St Mary stayed home by the fire when the mists descended, Shirley loved to slip out and settle himself in a tree, watching the white wisps clinging briefly to the trees before drifting off who knows where. His family often laughed that Shirley was the 'unromantic' one of the Blythes, a lad who had inherited Susan's solid common sense rather than Anne's dreams. Little did they know that these nights in the fog were when the mysteries of the Glen came to life for him and he shivered deliciously as characters danced in his mind. 

Walter was the only one who came close to understanding this, and as hard as it was to believe, Walter was gone. Shirley still had the letter, preserved in the back of his prayer book. He never touched it after the first, terrible reading in college. Instead Shirley chose to remember the times before, when his brother had woven stories of ghosts and ghouls, more vivid in the fog than they had ever been in daylight. Sometimes he found Walter there by the trees, and they sat together, the fog making the silence stronger and more companionable. 

These thoughts had been drifting through Shirley's head as he mechanically tightened straps and checked the plates, barely registering the shouts which started to echo around the airfield until Jimmy, scarlet faced and bright eyed, burst into the hanger. 

“Blythe! Blythe!” Finally Shirley looked up in some confusion “It's over! It's over!” He was pulled down from the cockpit and half-spun in a circle, his friend clapping him on the back. “It's done! We can go home!”

It was different for Jimmy, his young wife and unknown baby daughter waiting for him at home. Most of the men spoke of wives or sweethearts, and Shirley's reticence on the matter was mocked, not always gently. The Glen did not call him home in the way that New Brunswick called Jimmy, and he had been away for such a short time compared to many. His duty felt nowhere near done.

It took a while for them to received their orders, but eventually many months after the Armistice and after a strange, disjointed Christmas still billeted in France, he found himself disembarking in Kingsport, with his kit bag, $35 dollars to equip himself with civilian clothes, a travel warrant and no idea what the future would hold. Kingsport itself was the first shock. A massive explosion had torn apart the docks a few months after he had sailed, and rebuilding was underway. Both sides of the great river had been damaged, and he was shocked to find pieces of metal embedded into walls of buildings, including the entrance to the church he attended while waiting for the last stretch of his journey to begin. Kingsport was one of the few ports not ice-bound that spring, and thousands of soldiers, sailors and airmen passed through on their passage home. Men wandered the streets with dazed expressions, and long queues formed for each train, desperate to get home. 

Three days after landing, Shirley found himself on a train and a boat and a train and finally disembarking on the old familiar platform from which he had departed so quietly almost two years before.

They did not know to expect him, and as he walked towards Ingleside in the gathering dusk, he caught a glimpse through the window. There was Mother, work in hand as she sat near the fire. Father stood with a fat volume in his hand, deep in discussion with – so Jem was home! Rilla was bent over something, scribbling busily, but as he approached, cast her pen aside and crossed over to shut the curtains. She paused for a moment, peering out into the gloom, and then all faces in the room turned to the window as Rilla dashed away. The front door was flung open, and his sister was in his arms, swinging him round. 

Mother and Father had welcomed him back, and Susan's face blazed with quiet joy at the sight of her little brown boy. The twins were both away, and phone calls had been made to spread the glad news of another homecoming. After a festive meal prolonged by prayers of thanks, they sat quietly looking at Shirley, until he could bear it no longer. Springing to his feet he muttered something about fresh air, and with a shake of the head at Rilla as she made moved to follow, he was gone.

Two years less a month since he had been home last, and he found the weight of their rejoicing oppressive. What had he achieved? He had not been injured or captured, or even suffered the mud and the trenches. His battles had been clean and distant ones as he had worked mainly on reconnaissance flights, patrolling and photographing the battlelines. He had fired his guns, but although he had seen planes spiralling down to crash into fragments of fire and oil, they had always felt distanced from his own peril. The month he had joined up had seen more men killed in aerial combat than ever before, but by the time he was trained and shipped over, he had pushed the fear away. He was here to do a job, and do it he must. 

To be welcomed home as a hero felt so wrong, and the celebrations felt undeserved. He had done what was needed, but not as much as most, including his brothers. Jem spending so long as a prisoner, and Walter... Even Faith Meredith had served overseas, and Carl and his eye... his thoughts were disjointed and his hands clenched into fists as he looked back on Ingleside, realising that it didn't feel like home anymore. He couldn't remember if it ever had.  
The weeks that followed were strange and troubling ones for Shirley. Outwardly he was his usual quiet self, adjusting to life back in Canada. He found a job tutoring some of the top class for the Queens entrance exam, and spent a couple of hours a day teaching a mechanics mad thirteen year old who had been laid low with rheumatic fever and was still convalescing. 

As spring moved into summer, he maintained the silent rhythm: teaching, reading, church, planning. In the evenings he eschewed the comfortable sitting room for the kitchen, where Susan's watchful eye and silent fierceness kept the others at bay. More than once he caught Rilla crying after a brief visit from Jims, now preparing to start school, but she was preparing for her wedding to Kenneth Ford and the snatched moments of closeness quickly dwindled. 

Everyone was preparing for the future. Faith and Jem were to marry, as were Nan and Jerry and Rilla and Ken. Jem was going to college in Redmond that fall, back on the path he had started before the war, to be a doctor. Sometimes he envied his brother the certainty and confidence that carried him forward – Jem had always known he would follow his father and had been doggedly following that path since he was eleven. Walter had flamed bright and gone, and Rilla had always been a homely little body. Only the twins were different, and now Nan was in the midst of planning a future apart from her twin, Shirley had wondered if he and Di might grow closer. There was always a block in the way: he wasn't Walter. 

That was the problem. He felt constantly in the shadow of his brilliant, sparkling family. He felt cowed by their confidence and drive, by their certainty. There was an assumption that he would return to Queens in the fall, to complete the year of study he had abandoned in 1917, but it felt like a world away. He could bypass that path and attend Redmond – his three and a half years at Queens would grant him that boon – but was it what he wanted? What did he want? All he could think of was to escape, to get away from the place where he was expected to be the hero he was not, where he had to live with the weight of expectations unconsciously placed upon him as one of the sons who had returned where others had not.

Unexpectedly it was Carl who gave him the answer. The boys – men – often shared companionable moments in Rainbow Valley, while Jem, Faith, Nan, Jerry and Rilla were caught up in parties, courting and starry eyed plans for future happiness. Di and Una poured their energies into charity work, and cherished their own secret hopes and sorrows. They came to their childhood place of magic, but they had jobs to do and so much to get on with. Carl and Shirley were in limbo, and Rainbow Valley was the perfect, enchanted place to forget their troubles, or occasionally to share them. They could sit in silence together and watch the rabbits at play by the waters edge, fish for trout, and revel in a whole selection of other boyhood pursuits. After years of being soldiers and airmen it was time to learn to be young again. Sometimes young Bruce Meredith joined them, happily climbing trees and learning the delights of fresh fried fish hot from the ancient pan. He was learning to whittle with an old knife of Jerry’s, and was soon producing passable reproductions of the local wildlife, bringing them into vivid colour with his paintbox. 

Shirley found himself fascinated by birds in flight, comparing them to his own plane which he missed horribly. He sought out books on mechanics and engineering, and borrowed Carl’s field glasses to compare more closely. Carl was highly amused by this and produced bird books for details of wingspan and wing structure. They spent a fascinating afternoon dissecting a dead crow captured by Houdini, the new cat at Ingleside, who could be trapped into any corner and yet be discovered five minutes later licking a paw without a care in the world. Susan had discovered the crow with a slippered foot, and her yell had brought Jem and Shirley to the kitchen at a rate of knots. Shirley was quick to remove the poor feathered creature and hurried to find Carl, who dashed home for his tools with the old gleam in his eye. 

Carl was adjusting too. His good eye had become overstrained and he wore his new spectacles over his patch with an air of resignation, and reluctantly reduced his reading. There were murmurs about him putting off college for a couple of years or following a correspondence course instead. As a 'disabled veteran', had been given a pamphlet about the courses of study he could follow to fit him for work, but he had thrown it down in disgust, declaring what he wanted to do – what he had always wanted to do – was to explore and discover new bugs. Shirley, feeling fidgety himself, eyed his friend then produced some paper and a stub of pencil from his pocket and informed him that they were going to make a plan. 

Carl and Shirley left Glen St Mary on the same day, but for very different destinations. Carl was headed to Toronto to study at the university, while Shirley was doing what he had sworn never to do; he was going to teach. The two boys who had gone to war so quietly caught the train surrounded by their families, and Anne caught her breath at the memories of so many other partings. She was heartbroken that her youngest lad was travelling so far from them, but the night before they had had a rare conversation while they finished packing his trunk. “It’s my piper, Mother. I followed the call before, but now I need to follow my own. I’ll come back, I promise.” In a few quiet words he laid out his thoughts and she nodded. Later she laid her head on Gilbert’s shoulder and he stroked her hair, still red among the grey. 

Toronto was bigger than Shirley had imagined, many times the size of dear familiar Charlottetown and even dwarfing Kingsport. He left his trunk at the station and helped Carl move into his lodgings, marvelling together at the fine university buildings and grand new Museum just a couple of blocks away. Then, after a meal and a restless night, he boarded a train headed West and ventured into the unknown. 

Although he had brought books and papers with him, Shirley found himself fascinated by the landscape he passed through. Forests, fields, farms, towns and homesteads – glimpses of so many different types of lives. He caught glimpses of birds, too far to identify, cows ran and horses galloped alongside the track at the train’s whistle. With each mile he travelled, he felt his spirits lift, even as other passengers fidgeted and sighed. Eventually the flatlands of the middle provinces gave way to the soaring mountains and he longed to abandon his journey there. Instead he gazed, filling the margins of his papers and sheets of his writing pad with sketches and notes. At night he wrote long letters to Ingleside and to Carl, wishing he had his mother’s way with words and feeling his turns of phrase were a poor substitute. 

Vancouver was completely unlike anything he had imagined. In the thirty-odd years since the great fire it had flourished, and rather than the dusty frontier town he had half expected, he found a bustling metropolis with streetcars and electricity. But most thrilling of all, as Shirley stepped off the train, suitcase in hand, a JN-4 flew overhead. His heart gave a leap; he hadn't realised how much he had missed the Jennies, and here was one welcoming him to his new home. His boarding house was in a poky side street, but not far from the water front, where in time he would watch the seaplanes take off and land. 

Teachers salaries in BC were more than three times what he would have earned in PEI, and Shirley lived as frugally as he could, putting money aside each month towards his dream. The letters which travelled from the Glen to Vancouver were full of news, but with an undercurrent of bafflement. Only Carl, venturing on his own in Toronto, and Susan, steadfast and trusting, seemed to believe he had made the right choice. He returned for a month the first summer, in time to see Rilla married in the little Glen church they had attended as children. Carl's eyepatch marked him as a veteran, but as he confessed later, he felt the difference more in the Glen than he had in Toronto. They were both outsiders in their hometown, and shared a realisation that they might never be truly settled there again.

Back in British Columbia, Shirley was flying once more. He had given up teaching, only ever a stopgap and never a vocation, and was now employed by a new company which flew surveying equipment, post and supplies north. Conditions were often difficult, but Shirley revelled in them, his studies with Carl giving him a deeper understanding of the mechanics of flight than he’d realised. He was occasionally stranded when poor weather set in, and found himself an unexpected secondary career teaching loggers to read and write. Nothing could beat the feeling of freedom as he took to the skies, and he continued to put aside dollars and cents towards the dream of his own plane. He flew to the edge of the mountains, across to Vancouver Island, and high into the remotest corners of the Pacific North West. There were hairy moments when fuel ran low or a flock of geese threatened to fly too close, or when the ice on his windshield gradually shrank his visibility to a tiny window, but his mind was sharp and he always found his way.

Carl, who had never flown, had made Shirley promise that one day he'd take him to explore, and Shirley intended to keep that promise. During Shirley's fourth year in BC, Carl travelled West for an extended visit. A former professor of his was setting up at the University of British Columbia, and wanted Carl to join him in the new department. More cautious than Shirley, Carl was less inclined to commit to the unknown, but he still sparkled at the idea of adventure. He had been in Vancouver less than a fortnight before he found himself strapped into the second seat of the small plane, a sack of mail, four small crates of goodies, and a new set of lenses for a theodolite, strapped in behind. He looked askance as they were loaded, but Shirley’s practicality as he tested the balance and consulted charts kept his breathing steady even if his heart rate rose.

When Carl opened his eyes again the green field was far behind them and there was water ahead. He gripped the edge of his seat, and then caught Shirley grinning at him. The younger man’s face was a wreath of smiles as he adjusted a lever and manoeuvred the plane into a gentle turn. There was Vancouver! Carl’s good eye was on the pilot’s side, so he had to crane his neck to look below. Then another big curve and they were off and away, over the Fraser river and heading along the coast. Vancouver Island glimmered witchily in the morning haze, and in the distance the horizon rose into craggy peaks. Shortly after commencing the return flight Shirley suddenly banked left, flying low over the water where a pod of whales had surfaced. When he glanced across to judge his friend’s reaction, Carl had tears in his eye.

They flew together as often as their work would allow, Carl picking up enough knowledge to assist with the maintenance. He learned to take the controls for brief terrifying moments, until he was as comfortable sitting in the air as he was in his lab. He would never be a pilot like Shirley, but he could read the controls and navigate from their skytop perch. How could the charms of Glen St Mary draw them back when there were whales and porpoises, moose and bears, as well as a host of tiny colourful creatures to capture and study? 

He was there for almost three years, before they took their biggest chance together. It happened quite unexpectedly, when Shirley came back to the rooms they shared with the news that one of the pilots at the aerodrome was selling a reconditioned Curtiss Jenny. Carl, fresh from a walk along the shore caught the sigh in his friend’s voice. 

“How much?”

Shirley named a price almost twice what he had managed to save over the last six years. Carl thought hard and scribbled something on a piece of paper. “I can put in this”. They were so close, and if Bill would let them pay in instalments… Eyes blazing they looked at each other. Was this going to happen? They could hardly dare hope.

They had not been there for Nan's wedding to Jerry, but Shirley had returned three years before to stand beside Jem as he married Faith. Now, almost six years after his return from the War, Jem was newly qualified, and ready to set up in practice with his young wife. His father was finding his caseload too heavy, and was very glad of a chance to scale back. Faith had been keen to use her nursing background to assist, but now a delightful small distraction had arrived and they were keen that the newest Blythe should meet his whole family. Shirley and Carl created quite a stir in the town, arriving not by the usual method, but by air! 

It had taken them more than a fortnight to make the long journey, landing in odd places and waiting for the weather to allow clear passage through the mountain valleys, but it had been the most joyful times either of them could remember. It was freedom, purely and utterly. They landed on deserted tracts of land, camped in fields, in barns, and occasionally in farmhouses, and cut a strange pair. Carl's eyepatch only hid his some of his scars, and Shirley's chin bristled with a most disreputable beard. There was peace in the air, the peace of unstrained friendship. It was too noisy to talk, and they had rapidly developed their own signs and shorthand, passed back and forth on grimy paper. The smell of oil welcomed them each morning, and when Prince Edward Island finally came into sight, it was with a sense that one of the happiest times of their lives was now coming to a close. There was something comforting and certain up here in the blue.

Shirley had seen the island from the air before, but for Carl high in the front seat this was completely new. He watched in fascination as his brain adjusted to seeing familiar landmarks from the skies, whooping with delight as he recognised a neighbour hanging out her washing. They made several slow circuits over the Glen, before finally landing some eight miles away, where an old college friend of Carl's was waiting to drive them home.  
It was a long awaited homecoming. The Rev. Meredith was becoming frailer, and a sharp case of influenza last winter had left both Dr Blythe and Susan in less than full health. Shirley was surprised to find himself considering looking for new adventures closer to the Island, and for the first time in many years felt a pang of longing to spend time with his family. He kept this very much to himself, but the cry of joy when he tentatively suggested this, gave him an unexpected glow.

A week after the wanderers returned, two cars could be seen trundling their way across the red roads of the island towards the locked barn where Podilymbus (named for the grebe Carl declared she resembled) sat in solitary splendour. She was wheeled out and the family gasped – whether in horror or admiration Shirley decided not to question – and he gave the side a reassuring pat. Then he turned around “So who's first?” There was a pause, and he could have sworn that several people took a half step back.

It was Susan, solid, no nonsense Susan who quaked inwardly as she climbed the steps and let Shirley and Carl help her into the plane. Then Carl was down, waiting for Shirley's signal to swing the propeller, remove the chocks and run back across to the waiting Blythes. Rilla, holding tight to Small Gilbert, looked hard at the aircraft as it sped past, but all she could see of Susan was a flash of the big green muffler Shirley had swathed her in. Then one – two – three big bumps and it was away, climbing higher and higher. 

Shirley leant forward in his seat so he could see Susan. He caught a glimpse of her face, grim and determined as she cautiously opened one eye, and shut it quickly. The early morning mist still lingered in field pockets far below, but up here it was clear and blue. He focused on his instruments, and when he looked up again she was looking out to the side. He flew towards the sea, over the old House of Dreams, over the churchyard where the Rev Meredith stood peering upwards, over Ingleside, and over Rainbow Valley, home now to a new generation of Blythes and Merediths to play, scheme and dream. 

Then back to the field, over the laughing waving crowd of family, and lower – lower – lower – they were down. Susan released her iron grip on the seat and allowed the boys to assist her climb stiffly down. She was still shaking a little as she unwound the enormous scarf and removed the goggles, but the pride in her boy was unexpected and immense. She saw him watching her now and her face relaxed into a smile. Shirley was struck once more by the love in her look. The rest of the family were approaching now, clamouring to be next, to see the engine, to quiz Susan about what she’d seen. Shirley caught Carl’s eye and they laughed at each other. They had found their paths in life, and unexpectedly, it was grand to be home.

**Author's Note:**

> I have taken Kingsport to be Halifax, where two ships collided in 1917. One was laden with munitions and over 2000 people were killed by the resulting explosion. Almost a century later, the metal is still embeded in the wall of the church.
> 
> Shirley’s cargo plane is based on this:  
> http://www.aerofiles.com/jacuzzi-mono.jpg where as far as I can tell, the two seats are adjacent.
> 
> This is the JN-4 (Jenny) of the type that Shirley flew in the war, and later bought with Carl. The pilot sits in the rear seat, the passenger in front.  
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtiss_JN-4 
> 
> One of the accounts I read of Armistice day mentions the fog. This story took shape from there.


End file.
